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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jhild who wrote (73197)	11/13/2000 6:26:10 PM
From: ColtonGang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

BUSH's overconfidence may have cost him the election......... Political Memo: G.O.P. Questioning Bush's Campaign By RICHARD L. BERKE ASHINGTON, Nov. 12 — As Gov. George W. Bush struggles to win a bare electoral margin, many prominent Republicans and party operatives are now questioning his strategy in the final days before the election. They say the campaign's top advisers were consumed with such confidence that they made crucial mistakes that probably cost Mr. Bush a comfortable victory. The biggest complaint of many Republicans is that Bush strategists, savoring polls showing consistently that they were slightly ahead in the nationwide vote, were so certain they had locked up many battleground states that they sent the candidate on what some feared looked like a victory lap to states they had little chance of winning. That included trips to California and New Jersey in the last days of the campaign. These Republicans said one result of the campaign's and the candidate's sense of confidence, even hubris, was that Mr. Bush took a Sunday off the trail just over a week before the election. And, they said, he did not stump as energetically as Vice President Al Gore. "Had Bush not taken that Sunday off, I don't think he'd be in this situation," said Roger Stone, a Republican strategist. "The guy thought he was coasting toward a big win." Bill Dal Col, who ran the losing Senate campaign of Representative Rick A. Lazio in New York, said, "In the last four days in particular, Gore looked like he was running a 100-yard dash, and Bush looked like a guy who was finishing a 26-mile marathon." Throughout the primaries and general election, the Bush campaign had been unusually confident, partly because Mr. Bush and his aides genuinely seemed to think they would win. But advisers also said they were trying to convey a sense of inevitability to Mr. Bush's candidacy. Since the election, the Bush team has done much the same thing, striking the posture of victory, which helps explain why Mr. Bush spoke last week about his planning for the transition and his aides leaked the names of potential top cabinet members. By contrast, Mr. Gore, in part because his camp felt far less assured of a victory, concentrated far more effort in states like Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan. Even on Election Day — after 30 hours of barnstorming around the country — Mr. Gore did not sit still, calling radio stations in Western states. The Gore operation was also more aggressive in the final days in producing new commercials and emphasizing issue differences with Mr. Bush. Even Bush operatives said, in retrospect, that they had underestimated the potency of the Democrats' get- out-the-vote operation. John Ellis, Mr. Bush's first cousin, said Mr. Bush and his aides were convinced that they would win a decisive, if not comfortable, margin and did not have to worry much about many states they ended up losing, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa. Mr. Ellis, who heads the election desk at the Fox News Channel, also said campaign officials thought they would pull ahead in Florida, where the results are, of course, in contention. Mr. Ellis said Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey led the campaign to believe it could even prevail there, a state most Republicans had written off months earlier. Others advising the campaign, he said, thought Mr. Bush could carry California. Mr. Gore won New Jersey with a resounding 56 percent of the vote, and California with 54 percent. "There were people in the campaign who felt that with the Republican base so fired up and unified, and Governor Bush not threatening elements of the Democratic base, that the result would be even more decisive," said Mr. Ellis. "They thought they had a good shot at Pennsylvania. They thought they might eke out Michigan. They thought they'd win Wisconsin. They thought they'd win Iowa. They thought they had a shot at California."